


The Sleepers in that Quiet Earth

by AnneArthur



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:20:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22190047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnneArthur/pseuds/AnneArthur
Summary: Three times Snape read 'Wuthering Heights'.Snape's relationship to Lily has often been compared to the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy in 'Wuthering Heights' - but there is a lot more to the book than that relationship. This is my take on it. As well as Emily Bronte and Kate Bush, I should acknowledge John Sutherland's entertaining and thought-provoking essay 'Who gets what in Heathcliff's will?' in his book 'Can Jane Eyre be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction'.This story is set in the same universe as 'A Working Relationship', in which Snape survives the battle of Hogwarts.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	The Sleepers in that Quiet Earth

He first read the book when he was given it, on his thirteenth birthday.

It's a girl's book, that had been his first thought. Closely followed by, it's a Muggle book. It had been his present from Lily - in his second year at Hogwarts, when he already seemed to be losing her to that gang of Gryffindor girls she went around with - Mary Macdonald, Olivia Darke, Rosie Brown and the others. The book had seemed - no, not like an insult, worse than that, like a casual present she hadn't put too much thought into. With a subtext that the Muggle world meant more to her now than it had when they were children, and should mean more to him too. But it was from Lily, so he read it - in bed, by wandlight, when his dorm-mates were asleep. There was no way he would want Avery and Mulciber to catch him reading Muggle books.

It started badly. 'When I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows', on the very first page, alarmed him - he had black eyes, and Lily had often commented on them: was this then meant to be him? 'A dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman' - that was worse. He had made a deliberate effort since he came to Hogwarts to improve himself: his shabby, second-hand robes were washed, ironed and charmed to as near to new as they were ever going to get, and he was consciously basing his manner on Lucius Malfoy, Deputy Head Boy and, as far as Slytherin house was concerned, _arbiter elegantiarum_. Was Lily criticising this? Was this a warning? He shivered apprehensively, pulled the bedclothes closer round him, and continued to read.  
'Possibly, some people might suspect him of a degree of underbred pride; I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me that it is nothing of the sort: I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling - to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again.' Severus's heart swelled, and he put the book down for a minute, staring without seeing at the green curtains of his bed. That's me, he thought, that's exactly me. She's saying she knows, she's saying she understands, she's saying she . . . loves me? He would have to go on reading now - there was no way he was going to be able to sleep. He picked up the book again, moved his wand as close to the page as he could, and continued.

He had finished reading sometime in the small hours of the morning, but as the winter day dawned and the singing of the merpeople filtered through the rock walls, he was still lying awake, unsure what to think. For one thing, he didn't much like Heathcliff. If this was meant to be him, it was a caricature, and his heart cried out at the injustice of it. 'A dirty, ragged, black-haired child' - was that what Lily had seen that first day he had spoken to her in the park at Coketown? The adult Heathcliff, brutal and sadistic, pleased him no more - this was horror movie stuff, and his love for Cathy a nonsense. The second half of the book seemed entirely pointless to him. And yet . . . Heathliff's status - neither one thing nor the other, always looked down on, whispered about, shut out - Severus had known that all his life, and his soul burned with sympathy. Was this Lily saying that she saw too, she understood? And then, Cathy's speech to Nelly: 'Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire'? That was just what he had always felt! It wasn't just the surprise of finding a witch his age living in Coketown, of all places - it was Lily herself. The proof was that not only did he feel this kinship with her against all the people in the Muggle world, he felt it against everyone at Hogwarts too. Oh, surely she was trying to tell him that she felt it too! He repeated the words again and again: 'My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.' But when Cathy said this, she had just agreed to marry Edgar! An incident the previous week came to mind, when he had arrived late for Potions, and, finding the place next to Lily taken by James Potter, of all people, had had to go elsewhere - and then Potter had whispered something to Lily and she had laughed, then seen him looking at her and blushed. The Gryffindors were claiming Lily, as the Lintons had claimed Cathy - but she had never ceased to love Heathcliff. Even after death, her ghost came back for him! Was she saying that she had to conform to the pressures of Gryffindor house - and he understood that, wasn't he conforming to the pressures of Slytherin? - but that, like Cathy in the book, she would not forget him, would use her new friends, her new status, to help him? But look how well that worked in the book! How likely was it that someone like Potter, or Black, would ever agree to be friends with him? Eventually he decided that the only thing to do was to get Lily alone, and to try to draw her into conversation about her present.

So he was glad that that day in Potions James Potter was larking about with his entourage at the other end of the room - he could sit down next to Lily undisturbed.  
'I really enjoyed that book you gave me,' he said, as casually as he could, setting out his scales and equipment.  
'Have you finished it, already?' Lily looked up from her cauldron, surprised.  
'Sat up reading it till three in the morning.' He smiled.  
'Oh Sev! You mustn't do that - you'll make yourself ill.' That was her first reaction - concern for his health! A happy warmth washed over him. 'But I'm so glad you liked it! I was like that too - Mum gave it to me for Christmas, and I couldn't put it down. Tuney loves it too.' Why bring her into it? thought Severus savagely. This is _our_ book. 'I did hope you would enjoy it, but I was a bit worried that you might think it too much of a girl's book. But then I thought that of course you would be too sensible for that. It's an amazing story, isn't it? And I thought it might remind you of the moors above Coketown - it always does me, anyway.'  
Their conversation was interrupted at this point by Professor Slughorn explaining how to brew a swelling solution, and after that Lily proved more interested in the intricacies of the potion than in discussing _Wuthering Heights_. On other occasions when he tried to bring the subject round to the book, he met with the same vague responses - a great story, the Yorkshire landscape she missed so much, her infuriating sister. But he was happy. She was reserved, like him. She wouldn't bare her heart for everyone to see, but he was convinced that the similarities between the 'amazing story' and their own were not lost on her, and that she was speaking to him through it. And that he would not mind reading a 'girl's book' - that too was a compliment. James Potter would never be seen dead liking anything that a girl would like - and Severus knew that Lily despised him for it. Of late he had thought that Potter was becoming a little too keen on getting Lily into his Gryffindor clique - it was good still to be able to feel that she saw through him.

But as time went on Lily retreated further into the Gryffindor set, and Severus's hope faded. Edgar Linton took on all too real a form, and Lily was drawn more and more into his orbit - until Severus, goaded beyond endurance like Heathcliff, made his fatal mistake and lost her forever. And, because he had by that stage not read _Wuthering Heights_ for years, he did not realise that he reacted exactly like Heathcliff too - storming off in a fury. But he no longer wanted to think about Lily - or that stupid Muggle book. In the year he left Hogwarts, and James and Lily married, _Wuthering Heights_ had become a song, sung by a fey Muggle waif in white draperies, played everywhere.  
'Is that singing?' asked Lucius Malfoy, wrinkling his nose in fastidious disgust (the Dark Lord's business had taken them into the - to Lucius - unfamiliar setting of a Muggle pub). 'It sounds like a kneazle being tortured.' Severus, laughing, agreed, and added a foul comment about the tastes of Muggles.  
'Bad dreams in the night, they told me I was going to lose the fight' wailed the music. He shut his ears. 'Cruel Heathcliff, my one dream, my only master . . .' James Potter was her master now. He wished her joy of him.

The second time he read the book was after the Dark Lord's defeat, when he was convalescing, and he did so simply because it was in his house and he was bored. It made uncomfortable reading. Heathcliff was still a gothic travesty, but elements of him remained alarmingly familiar. That combination of love for Cathy and desire for revenge against the Lintons and Earnshaws - that was what had motivated him too, that was what had led to poor Lily's death, as it had led to Cathy's. And a page near the end arrested him, when Heathcliff, scheming to disinherit the younger Catherine and Hareton, finds when he looks at them that he cannot do so. 'They lifted their eyes together, to encounter Mr Heathcliff: perhaps you have never remarked that their eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw.' At once, Harry Potter's green eyes were before him - so exactly those of his mother, set so incongruously in James Potter's face - and Albus Dumbledore's words, cold and hard, piercing his misery: 'Her son lives. He has her eyes, precisely her eyes. You remember the shape and colour of Lily Evans's eyes, I am sure?' Had Dumbledore read Wuthering Heights? He wouldn't put it past him, the meddling old bastard - wouldn't put it past him to use it, as he used everything else, in his manipulation of his puppets. His anger at Dumbledore flared - then subsided. He was dead now - and good riddance. Getting angry with him would solve nothing. And Severus had chosen to protect Potter, annoying though the brat had been - he had not been coerced like Heathcliff, imperiussed by a combination of inherited eyes and vengeful ghost. For the ghost's motives too were far from pure - that much was clear to him on this second reading. She came back to claim Heathcliff, true, but also to prevent him from making a will that would disinherit her daughter. Even in death she was the mistress, and her estate would go to her flesh and blood, not to the nominees of an outsider. He laughed at this - the practical Yorkshire concerns with money and property that underlay the romance of the novel and that motivated both Heathcliff and Cathy as much as passion did. And had they not motivated him too - despised by Muggles, despised too by the wizarding world? Indeed - the thought came to him - might that not even have been (subconsciously, of course) part of the attraction of James Potter for Lily - an insider, a well-disposed Pureblood of good family, to protect her against the Dark Lord and his followers? He shook his head at that - he would never know, it was useless to speculate. He himself, like Heathcliff, would never be an insider - the Dark Lord would not have benefitted him, and the dominance of the Pureblood party at the Ministry had now given way again to the dominance of the Muggleborns and those who would patronise them. Always those two extremes of birth - those who, like himself, were neither, were of no interest to anybody. At least Heathcliff had died - died, apparently, with his hand in his ghostly Cathy's, and so, presumably, happily. Severus was going to have to live. It was a bitter thought.

He came across the book again when he and his wife were clearing out some shelves, trying to make more room for the books that sat in piles all over their flat, threatening to take over. There were two copies of _Wuthering Heights_ \- Cathy's (yes, ironically he had married a woman called Catharine, common enough though the name was) had no particular history, and she was happy to give way to the book whose inside cover proclaimed 'To Severus, happy birthday with love from Lily' - with the 'i' of Lily dotted with a tiny heart. Cathy smiled when she saw this - she had had classmates who had written their names like that, and it exactly fitted her private picture of this Beatrice to her husband's Dante. Opening the book inside the cover, she passed it across to him without comment.  
'Oh yes.' He laughed. 'That was my thirteenth birthday. I was so disappointed - I thought it was a girl's book - and then I read it, and loved it. I think we must keep that, do you mind?' When she smiled and shook her head he put it on the 'stay' pile - then changed his mind and put it aside. 'Actually, I think I might read it again.'

Reading it again, he decided to visit Lily's grave. He wasn't quite sure why. His daughters were ten, and would be starting at Hogwarts next year, and he was frightened for them. He knew that he would be hurt and disappointed if they were not sorted into Slytherin, and that he would worry if they were - was Slytherin still the pariah house, as it had been in his day? Did its students still react with a 'be damned to the lot of you' attitude? And the teachers would mostly be people whom he himself had taught - how would that affect Becky and Eileen? They were happy confident girls at the moment - quite unlike what he had been at their age - and he wanted them to stay that way. Everyone said that Hogwarts had changed - but just how much? In some obscure way, he wanted to make his peace with Lily, wanted her on his side.

Godric's Hollow was as he had remembered it - a dreary half-wizarding village. He snorted with disgust at the Potter Memorial (disguised to Muggle eyes as a war memorial). Lily had never simpered like that - his Lily, the real Lily, would have laughed at it. He wondered if the ruins of the Potter house were still standing - he had never been able to bring himself to visit it, and he found that he still could not. The neat white graves in the churchyard were better, although there was a large and showy wreath of white lilies on them, with a card proclaiming that they were in loving memory from Harry, Ginny, James, Albus and Lily. Severus had never liked those large lilies - when he thought of Lily as a flower, it was as a lily-of-the-valley, the pretty everyday flower of cottage gardens. He himself had brought roses - two white roses, one for Lily, and one, in a spirit of something that might be reconciliation, for James. Potter would think that mean, no doubt, if he visited the graves regularly - and maybe he did not, as the lilies were faded and turning brown - but Severus disliked ostentation as much as ever. And he came from Yorkshire after all, he thought, smiling to himself - one must uphold the stereotypes. He placed a rose in the vase on each grave, added some water from a bottle he had brought, and stood back.

Did he feel peaceful, forgiven by the dead? Did he feel confident that his girls would be happy at Hogwarts, would not make the same mistakes that he had made? Visiting this place had made no difference, he realised - Becky and Eileen would have to make their own way in life, and all he could do was watch and advise, and help them as best he could. That was as true now as it always had been - that was the risk he had taken, in bringing them into the world in the first place, and he now had no option but to live with it, and hope that it was something they could live with too. This was just a graveyard - long lines of monuments, mostly wizarding ones, set out neatly under the yews, quiet and peaceful in the sunshine of a spring afternoon. There was no sound of movement in the village, no sense of any supernatural presence, just calm. Severus thought of the end of _Wuthering Heights_ , when Lockwood visits the graves of Cathy, Edgar and Heathcliff: 'I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth'. Substitute grass and yew for heath and harebells, and that would fit this graveyard too. It came to him that if the all the romantics who saw _Wuthering Heights_ as a love story overlooked the materialistic aspect of the book, they also tended to overlook the later part, where the wrongs of the first generation are set right in the second. Maybe that would be true in his life too - for his daughters and Potter's children, for the next generation of Malfoys and Weasleys and Parkinsons and Abbots. All he could do was hope, and do what he could to make it so. And now he had to go - he had promised Cathy that he would pick the girls up from school. He took one last look at the graves, and disapparated.


End file.
